Do Their Homework on .Co Launch? — Who Didn’t

Despite .co’s best efforts, cybersquatters pile on.

Washington Business Journal published a story today regarding firms that didn’t register their .co domain name equivalent, and how cybersquatters snapped up a lot of these domain names.

The story is somewhat amusing:

Local businesses beaten to the punch by online speculators include sports teams, media firms and even tech-savvy federal contractors.

“They didn’t do their homework,” stated William Schippert, a Michigan accountant who snatched up washingtonnationals.co and domain names for a number of other baseball and football teams “for potential e-commerce purposes.” He’s now auctioning them on Godaddy.com.

Actually, it’s Schippert that didn’t do his homework. He’s cybersquatting, and these teams can get their domain names back in a number of ways. Especially now that he’s on the record saying why he registered the domain names.

Whenever a fresh TLD is launched, or a ccTLD is relaunched, you see a lot of modest time cybersquatters jump in. The same thing happened with .me. I think it’s mostly an education thing; people recall back in the 90s when some people made money selling trademark domains back to their owners, and these people think this is an opportunity to relive that. But the world has changed since then.